Tag: addiction

Xanax Nation.

State sponsored sedation has flowered. Xanax, a freely available prescription drug, has, over thirty years, gradually climbed to the top spot drug-of-choice in America. In fact the rate of escalation is scary.  Treatment faculty admissions multiplied tenfold in the decade between 2003 and 2013. Emergency room visits for non-medical use rose fourfold during the same period.

Xanax operates very much like Aldous Huxley’s ‘Soma’ in Brave New World. Everything that’s bothering you leaves the room. It is not replaced by anything else that might challenge or demand or impel. Anxiety is a distant memory. You don’t need anything or anybody. All yearning is channeled into going-on-holiday which can begin to feel like religious Communion..

“The service had begun. The dedicated soma tablets were placed in the centre of the table. The loving cup of strawberry ice-cream soma was passed from hand to hand and, with the formula, “I drink to my annihilation,” twelve times quaffed.” Huxley. ‘Brave New World’

Of course it would be quite unthinkable, and therefor impossible, that inspired leadership might sit about actually discussing the means to sedate great swathes of their own population, yet every politician who ever clung to power knows that the greatest threat to their security comes from popular disaffection and what better way of dealing with torch bearers other than to send them on holiday? You have neither the messiness of police brutality nor the expense of incarceration.

”The holiday it gave was perfect and, if the morning after was disagreeable, it was so, not intrinsically, but only by comparison with the joys of the holiday. The remedy was to make the holiday continuous.” ibid

Pfizer have been kind enough to offer Xanax wannabees a special discount card that lets you have a month’s supply for just four dollars….on the understanding that once dependency has kicked in and you need to treble the dose, the burden of a thirtyfold mark up may well then fall back upon your withering shoulders. The card offer can be legally rescinded at any time. Just as soon as your life begins to revolve around it.

Shame about the potential seizures, convulsions and suicidal thoughts should you elect to discontinue your prescription..

Disaffected youth represent the greatest percentage of voters there have ever been, a force to be reckoned with as demonstrated recently by the death threats sent to survivors of the Parkland massacre for daring to have a problem with being shot at.

How much easier it would be if those kids just went to their trusted GPs and got a prescription, you know, to help with their anxiety? Make sure it’s more addictive than heroin and ten times the strength of Valium and within a matter of weeks the identified patient’s voice will be silenced, their preoccupation with Justice and Truth supplanted by the disorienting merry-go-round of alternately craving and not giving a shit.

Manufacturers of the drug appeal to their own authority to sell it to you, ‘Xanax original purpose was to combat the symptoms of anxiety and panic disorder’ so that’s okay, innit? They made it about the thing they are selling it for… and hey, you can tell its safe because it is not an opioid…..

It’s like saying a Grizzly is not dangerous because it’s not a Shark. The fact is that Xanax is addictive and dangerous, whether you OD on the way up, or top yourself from withdrawls on the way down, so why is it the fastest growing and most happening back room of big Pharma with 48 million prescriptions written in the USA and 16 million illegal users for 2013? How come teen dependence has trebled in recent years?(cited from Quora.)

Smack has such bad press these days. You can’t even sell it in cough syrup anymore. And so even if you’ve taken over the country that grows it and have your own soldiers guarding the poppy fields, you still have the hassle of indigenous hostiles taking pot shots at you and then there’s the aggravation of shipping it out. Anyway, everyone associates the word ‘epidemic ‘ with opioids these days, whilst Xanax is somehow still respectable as a designer drug created by scientists in white coats to rescue you from the inconvenience of Morphine..

So it must be okay. Right?

And because its okay you can get it on prescription most any place just by ticking boxes on a form and signing. Its cheap, for now, like the cut price opium the British flooded China with in the 1840’s during the eponymous Opium Wars,  a time in which the British became very angry that Emperor Lin Xe-zu didn’t want his people’s soul destroyed  and made him pay back the value of Opium he confiscated and publicly burned in his valiant efforts to save them. But it wasn’t the bars of silver that the British were really after any more than the press gang down the dockside alleys are after the content of your pockets.

Lin Ze-xu, calculated that in 1839 Chinese opium smokers consumed 100 million taels’ worth of the drug while the entire spending by the imperial government that year was a mere 40 million taels. He reportedly concluded, “If we continue to allow this trade to flourish, in a few dozen years we will find ourselves not only with no soldiers to resist the enemy, but also with no money to equip the army” quoted by Chesneaux et al., p. 55)

All of which might have been very handy to any wolves in the wings and so they kept the Opium pouring in despite Chinese officials entreating Sir Henry Pottinger, Her Majesty’s dealer, to cut the problem off at its source by recommending that the British government ban the cultivation of the poppy in India. Sir Henry gave the time honoured response of any mafia boss that, as long as there remained substantial numbers of opium-addicts and corrupt customs officers in China, prohibiting the cultivation of opium in India “would merely throw the market into other hands” (cited by Ssu-Yu Teng, p. 70

It never occurs to him that he might uphold the law.

We gotta be da criminals udderwise someone else gonna be da criminal. We gots no choices.

Others could see the immorality of chemical warfare against civilians for what it was..

”This war with China . . . really seems to me so wicked as to be a national sin of the greatest possible magnitude, and it distresses me very deeply. Cannot any thing be done by petition or otherwise to awaken men’s minds to the dreadful guilt we are incurring by the introduction of this demoralizing drug, which the government of China wishes to keep out, and which we, for the lucre of gain, want to introduce by force; and in this quarrel are going to burn and slay in the pride of our supposed superiority.” — Thomas Arnold to W. W. Hull, March 18, 1840.

So drugging nations is not a new thing as such, but drugging your own? That’s new. And if it’s so distasteful to witness the systematic crushing of a nation for gain half a world away, so distant at the time that naval dispatches referred to China as ‘that singular and hitherto almost unknown country’, what then, when such sin of greatest possible magnitude is unfolding on your own block? When there is quiet but systematic encouragement to absent oneself from issues that you can no longer feel and no longer matter. Or would that just be too horrific to contemplate?

Xanax, coming to a street corner near you.

If you liked this article and want to explore my books, you can type the titles ‘Abundant Delicious’ or ‘Going Mad to Stay Sane’ into the search bar for descriptions and sales.

 

Addiction and Connection.

We all know what causes addiction, right?

Drugs and Alcohol.

Wrong.

Pushers and bad neighbourhoods…

Nope.

Genetic inheritance?

Wrong again.

Some fascinating research has come out that shows pretty conclusively that drug addiction, which killed nearly a hundred thousand people in the USA alone in 2016, a year on year increase of over ten percent, is caused by none of the above.

So what could it be?

In the mid 20th C most of the experimentation into addiction and the conclusions drawn, which provided the popular model we have as to its causes, was done on rats in cages. They were given the option of regular clean water or water laced with heroin or cocaine. Without fail the rats took to the drugged water and duly expired, all of which seemed to demonstrate how helpless Ratus Ratus becomes in the face of temptation..

and by association, you and me.

Psychologist Bruce Alexander was unconvinced. He reflected on the number of folks in hospital on high grade diamorphine, the kind of painkiller used in hip replacements, used for weeks or even months at a time, that did not result in addiction. He also looked at heroin use by Vietnam soldiers, an estimated 20% of those deployed, and found that there was a staggering 95% spontaneous recovery rate once they returned stateside.

So what was the difference between the rats and the soldiers/ hospital patients?

The cage.

Alexander sought to test this hypothesis and put dozens of rats into the equivalent of five star rat heaven with ample toys and food and most importantly the opposite sex, along with the traditional option of heroin water and ordinary water. He found that the rats mostly ignored the drugs. They were far too busy being with each other.

The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is connection. Something we are not very good at despite our sophistication. So how can we account for this loss of connection? It doesn’t seem enough to talk about class conflict or capitalist competitiveness a la Marx, the loss of shared values suggested by Durkheim or Weber’s’ ‘alienation’ – mindlessly having to obey the rules of a faceless bureaucracy.

The maddening process of having to adapt to a mad world put forward by R. D. Laing is more tempting. You cannot manage such a contradictory dance without becoming internally split and having basic security unseated, though this still begs the question of what it is about contemporary society that makes it mad in the first place.

Social isolation, alienation from the group, is fairly easy to spot. The black sheep of the family, the kid who sits alone at lunch, the hostile co-worker, the crazy driver who carves you up in traffic without thought for the consequences. Less obvious is alienation from oneself. Being alone need not necessarily constitute loneliness. Most folk positively need alone time to recharge themselves. Likewise, being in the midst of others may not reduce loneliness at all. It might even make it worse.

Deeper and more biting than social isolation is self-estrangement, the kind of internal disaffection where I no longer comes calling on Me, where the inner pathways between different aspects of ourselves have become overgrown and abandoned.

One of the principle ways this happens is when kids grow up feeling they have to fulfill certain conditions in order to get loved. They learn that they have to be a certain way to gain approval, carry parental burdens whose covert expectations bends them out of shape, bury aliveness that draws envious sanction. This has the effect of walling children off, not just from one another but from themselves. A healthy ego cannot develop because there is way too much invested in projecting an ever more entrenched and idealized self-image. This ideal gets reinforced with social approval, momma’s little helper, teacher’s pet, the leader of tomorrow.

The cost to the child is they don’t know who they are anymore, their own destiny has been hijacked, hitched to a star not their own. The need to belong subverts the need to become.

This dynamic is poignantly expressed by Danny Kay’s Tubby the Tuba, who so wants to be a part of the orchestra that he has lost faith in the sound of his own song. He’s tempted to capitulate and just oom-pah along as he is supposed to but then reminds himself in a song of what that would cost him..

”Alone am I, me and I together. If I went away from me, how unhappy I would be.. Me and I .. oh my…’

He’s helped by a wise frog who encourages him to find his own voice though he risks the fury and rejection of all the other instruments in the process.

The question is, how does this prospect of self-estrangement cast its pall over our entire culture, so much so that tens of thousands of people a year are killed by addictions created out of the need to dull its pain?

We might get the idea of an isolated incident where a child feels compelled to betray itself for the sake of belonging and take to drugs as a way out. As a young heroin addict once told me, ‘Its easier just to take on all the family pain and then numb it with drugs than it is to shuck the burden.”

But how does this happen by the million?

The answer seems to be that self-estrangement is weaved into the very fabric of what we otherwise uphold as our fine upstanding social norms.

Trigger alert!

We are collectively encouraged to consider ourselves better than others to the point that healthy patriotism can become zenophobic hatred of entire nations upon whom we then happily project all those inferior aspects of ourselves that don’t fit with the ideal we are supposed to be, the ideal that gets us loved.

Couple this with any religion that supports such splitting, making other perspectives on spiritual life not just alien and stupid but wicked and evil, and soon you have entire populations that have effectively denied and demonised aspects of their inner worlds en masse to the point where only opioids will bridge the divide and give a moment’s respite from the resulting schism, stretching like a canyon across the desert lands of our otherwise proud and uplifted hearts.

It gets worse. The divisiveness that clings to ever narrowing bands of shining selfhood must go to war with any aspect of personality not quite up to the mark, which means that ego structure is weakened to the point that connection to the higher self, to embodied soulfullness, is lost.

Spirituality that is no more than ‘vain and empty repetition’ cannot be entertained because the personality is so divided against itself, so weakened by inner conflict, that the Self, whose impact de-integrates even the healthy ego, is experienced as simply too overwhelming. This is why Jung says, ”the more the church develops the more Christ dies.’ The covert purpose of such establishment is to prevent people from having their own experience, evicting them from the Ground of Being.

Divided and bereft, longing becomes craving. The Waters of Life become Gin, the manna of heaven, a ten dollar wrap or a handful of pills, the capacity for reflection – a line on a mirror.

Is it then too simplistic to suggest that the solution to epidemic drug use has something to do with collectively becoming a little less damn holy? Becoming tolerant of weakness rather than trying to eradicate it? Allowing oneself to feel shitty without it having to mean you’re shit? Letting others have a different point of view without it negating your own? Being curious, valuing divergence, rubbing shoulders with not-me?

If you want to kick the habit, get connected. Rediscover that childhood fascination with the new and the strange. Share something of yourself with your neighbour, even if it’s just your smile. Meet the eye of the newspaper man, give your fellow earthlings a nod in the street, raise the bar of receptivity.

but above all clear back the brush that’s overgrown the paths between your inner houses, knock down some of the stoney old walls of inner divisiveness and self-judgement, or at least acknowledge their presence and name them. Ask what rules you’re living by and break a few.

You’ll live longer..

and better…

and so will those around you.

If you liked this article and want to explore my books, you can type the titles ‘Abundant Delicious’ or ‘Going Mad to Stay Sane’ into the search bar for descriptions and sales.